Genes, judgments, and evolution : the social and political consequences of distributional and differential conflict

The following argument offers a sharper micro-foundational lens for studying human political and social behavior by demonstrating how political science might better incorporate the theory of evolution into its behavioral models, and by showing that differential conflict occasionally prevails over the materialist conflicts depicted in much of the modern social science literature. I take evolutionary psychology's understanding of manifest behavior as a point of departure, and then analyze the manifest behavior in terms of judgments, which are binary measurements at a particular point of reference; in other words, a given manifest behavior either did or did not occur at a particular point in time. I then show that judgments can 1) transmit from one individual to the next, 2) vary according to predictable adaptive processes, and 3) are either extinguished or flourish dependent upon the process of natural selection; judgments, therefore, meet the three requirements of evolutionary theory. Judgments, rather than genes, better describe the process of human political and social evolution, which becomes especially clear when one assesses the consequences of what I term "differential" outcomes in judgments.